Implicit attitudes about gender and emotion are associated with mothers’ but not fathers’ emotion socialization.

Abstract

The present study tested whether mothers and fathers differed in their implicit attitudes about the expression of sadness and anger in middle childhood boys and girls (ages 8 -12) and whether these implicit attitudes are associated with emotion socialization practices. Two implicit association tests (IATs) focusing on children's expression of sadness (sad) and anger (ang) were developed. A total of 302 and 289 parents completed the IAT sad and IAT ang , respectively, and parents self-reported on their explicit emotion beliefs and emotion socialization practices. Results indicated that mothers show more favorable attitudes toward sadness and anger expression by girls versus boys. Fathers showed no preference in either IAT, suggesting a lack of bias about the expression of sadness and anger. Mothers' performance on IAT ang was negatively associated with supportive sadness socialization and positively associated with unsupportive sadness and anger socialization. Findings suggest that mothers, but not fathers, may possess gender-related implicit biases about emotion expression in children, with implications for socialization practices. Public Significance StatementOur research shows that mothers have biases about emotion expression that are consistent with gender stereotypes. These biases occur on an implicit level and likely influence how mothers choose to parent their children.

Sex differences in toddlers’ negative attributions to challenges: Associations with maternal emotion coaching and emotional awareness

“…For example, R. M. Martin and Green (2005) found that preschool boys’ emotion understanding was strengthened through maternal use of emotion talk and cause‐focused explanations, which are characteristics of emotional coaching. In general, boys may receive less support for negative emotions than girls (Thomassin & Seddon, 2019). Mothers also may spend less time talking about the contexts of emotions with boys (Fivush et al., 2000) and using less emotion talk with boys (Cassano et al., 2007).…”

The effectiveness of knowledge mobilization on parent emotion beliefs is moderated by parent gender, dysregulation, and family expressiveness.

“…In a similar vein, a seminal study by Culp et al (1983) showed that mothers, unlike fathers, possessed low awareness of their gendered behaviour towards infants. One's awareness of biases, and the implicit versus explicit nature of biases, is relevant because it is proposed that explicit biases, which lie within one's conscious awareness, are more amenable to change (Thomassin & Seddon, 2019). Therefore, fathers may have accessed and reflected upon their gendered beliefs more easily than mothers.…”

“…First, we hypothesized that the KMb condition (vs. the control condition) would be more effective at impacting, or reducing, parents’ gendered beliefs. We further tested for parent gender, expecting that access to implicit and explicit beliefs about gendered emotion expression would be more salient to fathers and thus would be more malleable in fathers (Thomassin & Seddon, 2019). It was hypothesized that parent emotion dysregulation might prevent parents from fully engaging with the material in the KMb video, and therefore, parents high in emotion dysregulation may not respond as strongly to the KMb as parents endorsing low emotion dysregulation.…”

“…In other societies, these roles may differ, and thus emotion stereotypes and related gendered emotion beliefs may also differ. Further, while much research suggests that parents’ emotion beliefs relate to emotion parenting behaviour (Lozada et al, 2016; Thomassin et al, 2020), this is not always the case (Thomassin & Seddon, 2019). Assessing actual behavioural change as a function of the KMb effort was beyond the scope of the current research; thus, future research would benefit from examining the impact of KMb on actual parenting behaviour (e.g., parent–child interactions).…”

Measuring the Perceived Social Intelligence of Robots

“…Recognizing that gender may impact perceptions of social others, we additionally considered whether there exist differences in men and women's responses to the PSI scales. Gender differences appear across a range of topics related to social intelligence, including implicit beliefs about acceptable emotion expression in childhood [Thomassin and Seddon 2019 ], beliefs about the impact of body appearance on social standing [Wang et al 2019 ], and perceptions of threat and attractiveness based on facial expressions [Hester 2019 ]. Men and women also differ in how they perceive technology.…”